Thoughts on Ignorance and Quackery

MIoIR is part of the Manchester Business School Some thoughts on ignorance and ‘ grand challenges ’

The series constitute ‘ideas in progress,’ after the notion described by I.J. Good in ‘The Scientist Speculates.’ Good also describes ideas about ideas as ‘partly baked ideas’ believing that “ ... it is often better to be stimulating and wrong than boring and right.” While the papers do not take this tenet as an excuse for licence at the expense of rigour, they are exploratory and the ideas may...

Mesmerism, Galvanism and Quackery

On Ignorance and Contradiction

A critical view of the alleged significance of Belnap four-valued logic for reasoning under inconsistent and incomplete information is provided. The difficulty lies in the confusion between truth-values and information states, when reasoning about Boolean propositions. So our critique is along the lines of previous debates on the relevance of many-valued logics and especially of the extension o...

Quackery in India

men are found, who style themselves " Medical Practitioners." Under this word lies concealed the fact that the men in question have got no degrees in medicine from recognised institutions. They carry on the profession without having gone through any professional training either at a Medical College or School in India. They are nothing short of quacks, and it is a pity that the Government do not...

Title: Quantum Quackery

Peer review is no panacea; every generation must reevaluate empirical evidence in the context of its own time. For a century, quantum mechanics has defied common sense. However, common sense dictates that the stability of molecular bonds contradicts probabilistic, leaping electrons. In fact, Bohr’s quantum leap scenario violates the second law of thermodynamics and contradicts phase transition ...